Apple is in court again in China, defending another of its products from attack based on pre-existing claims from a Chinese company. This time around it’s Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, that has landed it in Chinese legal trouble, after last year another company took issue with the iPad trademark resulting in a $60 million settlement deal.

The claim this time is from Zhizhen Technology Co., a Shanghai company that holds a patent for voice recognition software for its “Xiao i Robot,” software that was originally patented back in 2004. Siri, Inc. was founded in 2007, after being spun out of SRI International and before being acquired by Apple in 2010. Zhizhen first filed suit back in July last year, at which time this video supposedly demonstrating a version of Xiao i Robot in action on a Lenovo device surfaced.

Xiao i Robot can be installed on smart TVs, and is employed by countries around the world in customer service functions, according to an article from Shanghai Daily published back in June 2012. The tech has apparently been used by 360buy.com, as well as the Chinese government and a number of other enterprise customers.

Zhizhen told says it will ask Apple to “stop manufacturing and selling products using its patent rights, once Apple’s infringement is confirmed,” one of its lawyers told the AFP. Should it be successful, it may also seek compensation down the road for any damage done by Siri to its financials to date. Apple had asked for the case to be dropped, and was rejected in that effort, the lawyer said. Today’s hearing paves the way for a full trial beginning in July 2013.

Recently, Apple has fallen under attack by Chinese media for customer service and return policy complaints. The company has responded on its official website to respond to some of these attacks, but analysts suggest this could be part of an effort to encourage more consumption of home-grown tech solutions by Chinese consumers. China also recently partnered with Ubuntu creator Canonical to develop a China-specific open source operating system that seems in part designed to wean its IT sector off of foreign-developed software tools.

It’s no secret that most lawyers are not on the cutting edge of technology.

And while the internet has been great for many businesses, it’s buried lawyers in an avalanche of digital data they are ill equipped to manage. This has driven the growth of an entire “eDiscovery” industry, with software and services vendors of all sizes, from mom-and-pop shops to publicly traded behemoths.

First, some background for the uninitiated: In any litigation, there is a “discovery” phase where the plaintiff and defendant exchange information in the form of documents, admissions, and depositions. In a major case, it’s a slog that can last years, with millions of documents exchanged and dozens of day-long depositions taken.

Abtin Buergari experienced some of that avalanche first-hand as a legal assistant at the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Preston Gates & Ellis (now K&L Gates). Buergari helped lawyers interface with the firm’s young ediscovery unit (which, incidentally, spun out Attenex Software, sold to eDiscovery juggernaut FTI Consulting for $88M in 2008), and became familiar with industry standard eDiscovery software and practices. Buergari worked with the tools at hand, and watched as the firm and its vendors racked up immense bills without delivering immense value. Buergari later worked at two eDiscovery vendors, and saw the same inefficient churning process repeated again and again. According to Buergari, “eDiscovery is not a happy, healthy industry. It’s a corrupt industry.”

In 2008, Buergari dropped out of law school and founded Modus eDiscovery to attack that inefficiency head-on. Modus’s main innovation is its business model. The company is a professional services provider and does not produce its own software, although, like other similar sophisticated eDiscovery providers, it does have technical staff on hand for integration and data work. However, unlike most vendors who bill law firms and their clients on a variable-cost model (hourly labor, per-gigabyte, etc.), Modus instead signs its clients up for fixed-fee managed service deals. According to Buergari, when the economy went south in 2007–08, companies started scrutinizing their legal spending more closely and realized something was wrong, and have responded very positively to Modus’s fixed-cost model. Where other vendors variable cost model incentivizes maximizing the size of discovery productions, Buergari says Modus’s goal is to reduce the amount of data. Less data means more efficiency and better alignment of client, law firm, and vendor goals.

I asked Buergari whether law firms were afraid of companies like Modus disrupting their profitable eDiscovery practices. He said he had not yet heard those complaints directly from law firms, and that “that’s life”—if law firms or their vendors don’t like efficiency, they will, ultimately, not be able to compete in the marketplace.

Even with its more modest bills, Modus is growing quickly: according to Buergari, the company is doubling its revenue every year. About a year ago, Buergari decided that Modus was ready to expand. Modus acquired Ivize, another litigation support vendor based in Georgia, which gave it a substantially larger footprint. Now Modus is set to enter the lucrative—and competitive—New York and California markets, where it is starting to hire.

Buergari is aiming high: his personal goal is to completely displace one of Modus’s major competitors. He seems confident he’ll succeed.

Nokia today posted Q1 earnings that show the Finnish company still trying to recover from a fast-declining legacy handset business. But in the meantime, it is continuing to play another card in its hand, that of patents and intellectual property licensing. This is an area that will bring Nokia €500 million ($653 million) in revenues this year, CFO Timo Ihamuotila said in Nokia’s earnings call today. And CEO Stephen Elop says the company is on the hunt for more.

Asked by one analyst on the call whether we may see more IP revenues in the pipeline, here’s what Elop had to say:

“It is very important to protect what we’re doing and make sure people [who profit from using that IP] are paying their fair share,” he said. “I can’t comment on specific vendors, but when there is a significant shift in vendor market share, when you see those shifts, that tends to create significant opportunties. We we are watching where we can take advantage of that, and we’ll be watching that closely.”

Nokia, which owns some 10,000 patent families, already has licensing deals in place with over 40 companies, including some big ones like Apple (visualization of what that means here) and BlackBerry (nee RIM).

It also has patent cases in play against HTC and Viewsonic.

Google, BlackBerry and others earlier this month came out in solidarity advocating limits for so-called patent trolls, companies that seem to exist only to sue and demand royalties on patents. But in reality, many suits are also being brought by larger tech companies like Apple and Google itself. In that sense, Nokia is not unique. But while it may not be the world’s biggest handset maker anymore, Nokia has a lot of IP from when it still was, and that could be one way to help level the playing field.

The company’s stock is down 12% currently in trading.

A victory for Facebook in its case against typosquatters — those who own domain names that are similar to those of a popular site, which they use to confuse people and potentially capitalize on that. The U.S. District Court for Northern California has ruled in favor of the social network in an action it took against several squatters, recommending the turnover of 105 domains and statutory damages of $2,795,000.

Not only should this mean that Facebook will be getting control of some 105 domains, but it looks like this makes Facebook one of the first big companies to win liability damages in a case tried under the U.S. Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. This act was formed to protect companies against those who create/register websites that allow typosquatters to monetize their domains. Up to now, liability has only been determined at the “motion to dismiss stage,” we understand, not the ruling stage.

As the ruling embedded below notes, some of the typosquatters would continue the initial typed confusion with “misuse of Facebook’s marks, typesetting, and color scheme” to lure people into entering personal information and other actions.

The original list of domains included sites like dacebook.com, facebokook.com, faceboocklogin.com, faacebok.com, facebookfreezer.com, facebooll.com, facegbook.com, gfacebook.com, and zh-facebook.com. No site on that particular list appears to be active at the moment. Many were registered in batches by single entities. For example, Newgate, the filing notes, registered 50 domains that sounded similar to Facebook, “registering and using infringing domain names to divert traffic from Facebook’s website in an effort to deceive users and make money.” In this case, the court applied a formula to each defendant, based on the number of domains held and other factors such as how they were used. The per-defendant breakdown ranges from $5,000 to $1.34 million.

With the suit going back to July 2011, Facebook has already recovered hundreds of domains named in it (including that list above). But there are still more, and Facebook says it will be pursuing them, too:

“We are pleased with the court’s recommendation. We will continue to use all the tools at our disposal to enforce against those who attempt to take advantage of the people who use our service,” said Craig Clark, Associate General Counsel, Facebook, in a statement by email.

The problem remains a persistent one. For example, I’ve just typed in “facebookl.com”, which Chrome suggested might actually be “facebookl.co”, which then redirected me here:

A study from Naked Security found that Facebook was one of the most popular domains preyed on by typosquatters, with slightly less frequency than Google and more than Twitter.

Full ruling below.

Feeling slighted by Google’s dominance in search? In Europe, you may soon be able to sue for damages. A new proposal published today by the European Commission proposes to spell out the details, and effectively make it easier and quicker, for consumers and businesses to sue large companies when they feel that they have been the victims of antitrust violations. These would sit on top of European fines and sanctions on companies for the same violations.

The proposals have been in the works for some time. “Took four years longer than I had hoped,” Neelie Kroes, a VP of the European Commission noted today.

The proposals would cover areas like cartels and abuses of dominant market position, the EC noted today in a statement. You can read the full proposal here.

Although it’s likely that bigger companies will push against the thought of more companies attacking them, this will come as a welcome counterbalance to worries by companies that appeal to the EU for help in antitrust cases. The latter group occasionally feel that some bigger companies get off too lightly, or that resolutions take too long to settle, or that the companies themselves are not getting direct redress for years of abuse.

For example, in an ongoing case concerning Google and search dominance brought by online mapping and travel companies, among others, Google has recently proposed a set of controls that it would put into place to make sure that it doesn’t give its own services preferential placement above those of its competitors. But with Almunia now saying Google must make more concessions, and competitors yet to put in their formal responses, it will be some time before a resolution is reached. In cases like this, now those who feel they’ve been affected will be able to consider whether they want to take more direct action for compensation.

“Infringements of the antitrust rules cause serious harm to European consumers and businesses” said EC VP Joaquín Almunia, who oversees competition issues, in a statement. “We must ensure that all victims of these infringements can obtain redress for the harm they suffered, especially once a competition authority has found and sanctioned such a breach. It is true that the right to claim compensation before national courts exists in all EU Member States but businesses and citizens are not always able to exercise it in practice. Today’s proposal seeks to remove these obstacles”.

It’s not that individuals and companies have not sued in the past, but because the process of doing so has been too difficult or costly, many have avoided this route.

“Due to procedural obstacles and legal uncertainty, only few of these victims actually manage to obtain compensation. This situation particularly affects consumers and SMEs, which most often do not engage in legal action for reparation of their harm,” the EC notes. Only in 25% of all antitrust infringement decisions the Commission took in the past seven years did the victims seek to obtain compensation, it further notes. As with a lot of legal cases in Europe, the fact that there are different rules in each country also has slowed things down.

On top of putting into place some procedures for how people can sue, the EC says it plans to put some pressure on to individual member states to harmonize their “redress mechanisms.”

Here are some of the details of what the proposals hope to cover:

• National courts will be able to order companies to disclose evidence in compensation claims.
• An infringement decision by a national competition authority will apply in another member state.
• “Rules on limitation periods, i.e. the period of time within which victims can bring an action for damages, will be clarified. In particular, this will ensure that victims can effectively claim damages once an infringement has been found by a competition authority.”
• “The liability rules in cases where price increases due to an infringement are ‘passed on’ along the distribution or supply chain will be clarified. In practice, this will ensure that those who suffered the harm in the end will be the ones receiving compensation.”
• Settlements will also be tackled, with the idea that these will be easier to reach and in a less costly (probably quicker) manner.

What’s also interesting is that this is not a call for a legal-free-for-all. “Contrary to the U.S. system,” the EC notes with possibly the slightest hint of a sneer at the litigiousness on the other side of the Atlantic, “the proposal does not seek to leave the punishment and deterrence to private litigation. Rather, its main objective is to facilitate full and fair compensation for victims once a public authority has found and sanctioned an infringement.” Whether that will mean ultimately less action at the end of the day remains to be seen.

The next step is for the proposal to be discussed by the European Parliament and the Council “according to the ordinary legislative procedure.” After that approval, member states will have two years to implement the new rules.

SAP, the enterprise software behemoth dealt a $345 million penalty earlier this year in a patent case brought by Versata, has been given a window of opportunity in getting that case overturned, thanks to new rules in the America Invents Act concerning business method patents. SAP is the very first company to test out the new rules, part of some of the most significant reforms to the patent industry in years, which could potentially help turn around a system that has been much abused in the tech industry by both patent trolls but also legit companies.

Yesterday, SAP claimed a victory at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board over a business method patent around dynamic pricing technology, which Versata claims SAP infringed: the PTAB has now decided that that patent, number 6,553,350 (’350), is unpatentable.

This is the very first case to be tried under the new rules for business method patents, which are part of the America Invents Act. Business method patents are used to describe certain processes, often found in software; the problem is that they often get enforced with what some believe are too-wide interpretations, so the America Invents Act included a clause in it to try to reform this by letting companies appeal to a board over how general the patent in question really is.

SAP literally filed its appeal the day the Act was approved in September 2012, and the success of striking down the business method patent in this particular case could set a precedent for how other companies opposing business method patents may proceed.

The full decision is embedded below, but the background to this particular case centers around the ’350 patent. The case was first filed in 2007 by Versata, which claimed that software that it had created, and patented, to price items based on purchaser and other parameters, was effectively ripped off by SAP.

Versata’s claim was that it had a thriving market for its software, appropriately called Pricer. But then, when much-bigger SAP started to offer a product with similar features, business collapsed.

From its site:

After several stages of the case, with increasing fees levelled against SAP, the final ruling in May 2013 was for SAP to pay $345 million in damages.

That was, however, before this secondary appeal got seen by the PTAB. Erika Arner, a partner at IP law firm Finnegan, representing SAP, notes that the PTAB had determined that the ideas described in the patent were too abstract and general, and without “enough significant meaningful limitations to transform these abstract ideas into patent-eligible applications.” The PTAB, in fact, ruled all of Versata’s challenged claims unpatentable and therefore cancelled.

This, we understand, is just the first step for SAP in its attempt to turn the dispute in its favor. The USPTO is still considering whether to reexamine the patentability of Versata’s ’350 patent in a separate ex-parte reexamination proceeding based on prior art, notes  Arner.

And then comes the much bigger issue: whether SAP will be able to use these rulings to overturn the damages awarded to Versata. That case, before the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Court, is still pending.

Update: we reached out to Versata to ask for a response for this story before we first published but have yet to get a comment. However, in a Bloomberg post, Scott Cole, of Versata’s legal firm McKool Smith, for now is (predictably) saying that success for SAP in the bigger patent case (the $345 million one) is unlikely:

“We can certainly expect an attempt to use this finding to reach from the grave on the case they already lost…There are a variety of reasons why we don’t think that will happen.” One of these is the advanced state of the existing patent suit. An appeal could take the whole case into another year of legal slogging.

Be that as it may, the SAP case, on another level, is the first demonstration of a company taking a business method to task under the new rules, and winning. Although apparently there have only been just over two dozen requests made for business method patent reviews since the rules came into effect, that could set a profile and precedent for more. (Or, it could spur the government to expand the review to cover other kinds of software patents, as Bloomberg notes.)

Business method patents are obviously not just the terrain of older companies, nor of trolls hoping to cash in on an existing, active company’s fortunes. Amazon owns a business method patent on the One-Click shopping cart.

The rules, however, will make it easier for companies who are on the receiving end of those suits to formally question whether those patents are too abstract and therefore unpatentable. That could be a slippery slope, however, for companies that use business method patents legitimately.

“We are supportive of patent reform that stops trolls, etc. but big believers that America needs software patents to protect the small entrepreneur,” one software executive noted to TechCrunch. “Some business method patents have clearly gone too far — One-Click, etc. — but if you actually look at Versata’s patent — saying it is too abstract to patent is tantamount to throwing out all software patents and that would be a mistake.”

There are other efforts being made to also help form more useful patent methodology, such as the combined effort of StackExchange and the USTPO to crowdsource prior art that can be used to determine the validity of patents.

Microsoft went big on pushing cloud services this week at its Build conference, but today it was dealt a blow for how it might get to market them in Europe. BSkyB, the pay-TV broadcaster partly owned by News Corp., won a judgement in the England and Wales High Court against the U.S. software giant for infringing the “Sky” trademark.

The next step is another hearing in which the presiding judge, Justice Sarah Asplin, will hear arguments for an appeal from Microsoft, as well as decide on what remedies may be applied. Those remedies in past trademark cases have typically included financial compensation, an order to abandon usage of a name, and sometimes both.

Background. The case between Sky and Microsoft started back in June 2011 and specifically concerns “an action for passing off and for infringement of two registered Community trade marks (CTMs) and two UK registered trade marks (UKTMs) for the mark ‘SKY’ by which the Claimants [BSkyB] seek to prevent the Defendants [Microsoft] from using ‘SkyDrive’ as the name for their cloud storage service throughout the European Union.” The judgement published today comes after an eight-day trial in April of this year.

BSkyB is one of the largest pay-TV service providers in Europe, and like many TV broadcasters it has leveraged this to grow its digital audience. Within that, Sky also provides mobile apps and an online streaming service that are — yes — cloud-based. It also provided its own online storage service between 2008 and 2011, Sky Store & Share.

Microsoft, on its side, has put in a counterclaim trying to invalidate four Sky trademarks “on the grounds of descriptiveness for cloud storage services.” In other words, Microsoft believes that it’s not easy to confuse its cloud-based SkyDrive services with BSkyB’s pay-TV, mobile and online services.

You can read the full judgement, written by Justice Sarah Asplin, here or embedded below. In it, she compares Sky’s and Microsoft’s arguments to a number of other precedents in areas as diverse as the beer and the educational publishing industries, and weighs it up alongside evidence from surveys of existing users. Particularly detrimental to Microsoft’s case is that the two services often sit quite close to each other, as demonstrated in this piece of evidence for how the apps appear on the XBox:

Reading through the case (warning: it’s long) you can see that there are a lot of nuances, and so there may still be some options for Microsoft to appeal or get other leeway.

But regardless of that, Mrs Justice Asplin concluded today that the scope of BSkyB’s “SKY” registered trademarks, as well as its goodwill in the SKY brand, was such that Microsoft’s use of the “SkyDrive” mark was likely to cause confusion among consumers. She also decided that use by Microsoft of the “SkyDrive” brand was detrimental to the SKY mark which, in itself, amounted to trademark infringement.

A Microsoft spokesman has provided TechCrunch with a response to today’s ruling. “This case is only about the SkyDrive name and has nothing to do with service availability or future innovation,” he said. “The decision is one step in the legal process and Microsoft intends to appeal.”

In a way, the folks at BSkyB probably feel like some kind of justice has been served. In 2010, BSkyB filed a case against Skype (coincidentally just around the time that Microsoft announced it would buy it) for that name infringing on the Sky mark. It doesn’t appear that the case went anywhere, though.

We have reached out to BSkyB for its response and will update as we learn more.

Update: A Sky representative tells us, “Sky is pleased with the judgment handed down today by Mrs Justice Asplin. We regard any unauthorised use of the Sky name as a clear infringement of our well-established Sky brand. We remain vigilant in protecting the Sky brand and will continue to take appropriate action against those companies that seek to use our trademarks without consent.”